Zephaniah Alexander Looby

Looby came to the United States from Antigua in 1914, after his father died. In 1946 the NAACP hired him with Maurice Weaver and Thurgood Marshall to defend African Americans charged after the race riot in Columbia, Tennessee, and twenty-three of the defendants were acquitted. He lost a 1940 council runoff to a white opponent and a 1962 bid for the Tennessee Supreme Court. The Nashville Bar Association, whose white members had denied his application in the 1950s, granted him a posthumous certificate of membership ten years after his death.

What the plaque says

Zephaniah Alexander Looby 1899-1972 Z. Alexander Looby, attorney, statewide civil rights leader, and a founder of the Kent College of Law, Nashville's first law school for blacks since the 1890s, is credited with desegregating the city's airport dining room and public golf courses. In 1951, he and Robert E. Lillard were the first blacks elected to the city council since 1911. A member of the Metro Charter Commission, Looby retired in 1971 after having served under both forms of government.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 1.7 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 2.3 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 2.6 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• Ryman Auditorium — 2.7 mi
  The 1892 brick tabernacle in downtown Nashville that was the Grand Ole Opry's home from 1943 to 1974, now a National Historic Landmark and working concert hall.

More markers nearby

• Ted Rhodes — 1.1 mi
• Griggs Hall — 1.2 mi
• First Community Church — 1.4 mi
• Haynes High School — 1.5 mi